The way Saudi entrepreneur Mohammed Aldossary sees it, innovators are animated by the same motivations whether they are in Silicon Valley, the Arabian peninsula or in South Asia: they want to solve vexing problems at scale.
“What excites talent, what excites the community is to go build around those needs,” Aldorassy told the Fortune Global Forum on Sunday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He is the founder and CEO of SILQ, the result of the merger in April between Saudi business-to-business marketplace Sary, which connects small businesses with manufacturers to buy supplies, and Bangladesh’s ShopUp, which offers similar services.
Aldorassy said the vast majority of companies in Saudi Arabia are small and medium-sized enterprises, but they only account for 9% of bank lending. And that is the kind of problem that young Saudi entrepreneurs are tackling—and sparking a culture of innovation there, as evidenced by SILQ. “What differentiates us here is we have a younger generation,” Aldosarry said.
Indeed, some 63% of Saudis and 50% of Bangladeshis are under the age of 30, while only 30% of Americans are.
Lutfey Siddiqi, the special envoy for international affairs in Bangladesh’s interim government, also said at the Fortune Global Forum that his country’s young demographic is key to economic progress, making an oil analogy to explain how Bangladesh should leverage that advantage.
“Our crude oil is our young people, but we need refineries so that we were able to find applications for various grades of skills and education,” said Siddiqi, a former banker at UBS and Barclays. “That’s a resource that we are willing to share with the rest of the world. Because the rest of the world, by and large, is aging.”
He added that companies like Chevron, Met Life and Youngone, a Korean company that makes jackets for The North Face, have all praised Bangladesh’s more business-friendly climate that he attributed to government reforms that made the country more agile and responsive to direct foreign investment.
“That has allow us to convert what is an interest into actual investment,” Siddiqi said.
But as investors increasingly look to emerging markets, another panelist urged them to be mindful of their perception of risk when considering Africa in particular.
“We need to change the discourse when you talk about African continent. When you talk about the African continent, look at businesses on the continent and what they have achieved, and let that be your proxy,” said Mpumi Madisa, CEO of Bidvest Group, a services, trading, and distribution company listed on the Johannesburg stock exchage.
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